THE EMERGENCE OF THE PROPHET of Islam as perceived by the Muslim believers is the focus and culmination of the world's sacred history (tārīkh). This history proceeds through a continuous series of divine revelations delivered by successive prophets of whom Muḥammad is the last. Each prophet is elected to his mission in accordance with a predestined divine scheme. Glimpses of this historical outlook, already found in the earliest biographies of Muhammad, are marked by a clear apologetic trend. From the very beginning of their contacts with the ahl al-kitāb, the Muslims had to sustain the dogma that Muḥammad did indeed belong to the same exclusive predestined chain of prophets in whom the Jews and the Christians believed. In order to do so, the Muslims had to establish the story of Muḥammad's life on the same literary patterns as were used in the vitae of the other prophets. Since all of those prophets were biblical figures, Muḥammad's biography had to be shaped according to biblical models. This was supposed to convince the People of the Book who refused to recognize Muḥammad as a prophet like their own.

The shaping of the image of the prophet of Islam along biblical lines is typically exemplified in the theme of annunciation. Being regarded as a prophet whose election is predestined, Muḥammad's actual emergence in Arabia is annunciated by the previous prophets to whom the aim of God's historical scheme is revealed in advance, and whose task it is to pave the way for the emergence of Muḥammad. In their quest for literary evidence of the annunciation of their prophet, the Muslims used the same device as that used by the Christians for Jesus; they looked for attestation in previous sacred scriptures, and identified their own prophet with the messianic saviour whose emergence was believed to have been foretold in numerous biblical passages. These passages are quoted verbatim in Arabic translation in many polemical treatises by Muslim writers surveyed already by Goldziher and others. One of the earliest writers of these monographs was ‘Ali ibn Rabban al-Tabari (d. ca. AH 250), who devoted the bulk of his book al-Din wa-l-dawla fi ithbāt nubuwwat al-nabi Muhammad to the biblical quotations which were believed to refer to the prophet of Islam. Later writers not discussed by Goldziher and the others adduced similar quotations, and even contemporary Muslims keep repeating them for the same apologetic purposes.